The Best American Travel Writing 2019

by Jason Wilson

  But the promise of ease is not as common as the promise of dis-ease in our near-apocalyptic times, an oft-evoked idea in this year’s selection of essays (see Maddy Crowell’s “The Great Divide,” Lauren Markham’s “If These Walls Could Talk,” Nick Paumgarten’s “Water and the Wall,” and Noah Sneider’s “Cursed Fields”). And yet, surely, these from-the-ground (or melting-tundra, or desiccating-river) pieces are precisely the smelling salts we need to awaken us. Our world from the view of these daring writers is crowded, climate-changed, and increasingly nationalistic. But the experience of reading these well-crafted, necessarily astringent stories, while unsettling, isn’t all unpleasant. Great travel writing doesn’t only awaken us, but it also emboldens, inspires, and shakes us, precisely because it refuses platitudes and numbness and could care less about feel-good. These stories bring our shared world up to our noses and remind us that we, too, live here, one person among more than 7.5 billion on a tiny, lonely, imperiled planet.

  The year of these stories, 2018, was troubling for many. For myself, I lost my 21-year old son—inexplicably seized in his sleep—and the suffering of that loss has anchored me, temporarily or permanently it is too soon to tell, to the piece of ground in which he is now buried, in Wyoming where he was also born. My home country, Zimbabwe, or the country that raised me—how I longed for it, and for the people of my youth, in the days after my son’s sudden arrival as my ancestor—is, like the home of a few of the writers in this piece, no longer the place I knew as a child (see Devon O’Neil’s “Irmageddon,” Jessica Yen’s “Tributary,” and Lucas Loredo’s commendable “Mother Tongue”). As I write this, Zimbabwe is suffering from the double devastation of Cyclone Idai on top of decades of corruption and war and oppression.

  And yet, I took strange comfort in these essays not only for my own heart, but for the hearts of all humanity, precisely because they reminded me that clear minds and generous hearts are scouring the world for the fragments that might connect and heal us through this moment, through our terrible broken present. The essays found here demanded my scattered, grief-stricken attention and reminded me that mine is a puny suffering, a suffering among many greater sufferings, bravely born. Or, as my Zimbabwean friend consoled me (using my old nickname) when I told her of my son’s death, “Nematambudziko, Bobo: the first one is hardest.”

  The United States—although many of these pieces are written about other places, all of the writers are based here or have some connection to this soil—hasn’t yet faced its wounds squarely, let alone begun to dress and heal them. But the time for denial and deferment does appear to be up. Of course, such times also bring with them, as with all cycles of grief, denial and anger and bargaining before we can reach the blessed relief of acceptance, and from there, the ability to work repair into the fabric of ourselves. Cameron Hewitt’s “A Visit to Chernobyl: Travel in the Postapocalypse” is oddly uplifting and an example of can-do courage and repair in the USA’s now defunct mirror image, the USSR. Closer to home in every way, Jeff MacGregor’s “Taming the Lionfish” suggests the US may yet eat itself out of some of its problems with the help of a few seriously determined women. And finally, Rahawa Haile’s important, timely “I Walked from Selma to Montgomery” reminds us the way may be hot, and violent, and baffling, but that doesn’t remove from us the shared responsibility of strapping on our boots, or reinforcing our crutches and wheelchairs, and going where Martin Luther King Jr. pointed, all those years ago, together.

  Alexandra Fuller

  STEPHEN BENZ

  Overlooking Guantánamo

  from New England Review

  One day, our dispatch-boat found the shores of Guantánamo Bay flowing past on either side. It was at nightfall, and on the eastward point a small village was burning, and it happened that a fiery light was thrown upon some palm-trees so that it made them into enormous crimson feathers. The water was the colour of blue steel; the Cuban woods were sombre; high shivered the gory feathers. The last boatloads of the marine battalion were pulling for the beach.

  —Stephen Crane, “War Memories”

  Twenty years ago, I went to Santiago de Cuba to gather material for a magazine article on the centennial of the Spanish-American War. Over the course of several days, I visited Daiquirí, Siboney, Las Guásimas, El Caney, and of course San Juan Hill—all the main sites associated with that war. All, that is, except one: Guantánamo Bay. But visiting Guantánamo was practically impossible, even then, five years before it became a detention camp for prisoners of the “War on Terror.” The sites related to the Spanish-American War were located inside the perimeter of the US naval base—“Gitmo,” to use the military’s shorthand designation—and there was no access to the base from Cuba proper. The only way to enter Gitmo was to fly in on a Navy transport airplane from Virginia Beach, Virginia. And to do that, I would have to obtain permission—rarely granted—from naval authorities. So, much as I would have liked to visit the scene of the war’s first clash between Spanish and American troops, I had to accept the impracticality of such a visit.

  Forgoing Guantánamo was especially disappointing because of Stephen Crane’s connection to the place. Crane’s writing about the war and his various adventures in Cuba had long intrigued me. He was one of the few reporters to witness both the landing of the Marines at Guantánamo and their subsequent skirmish with Spanish troops. He wrote several accounts of the event, a couple of which are counted among his best work. In fact, a significant portion of Crane’s writing concerns Cuba, including a book of short stories (Wounds in the Rain), a long semiautobiographical essay (“War Memories”), and some of his best journalism. The time he spent on the island—a little over five months all told—holds outsized significance in his biography and his oeuvre. It was in Cuba that Crane—already famous for writing a war novel—finally witnessed warfare firsthand and up close. Shortly after hostilities ended, Crane came down with a severe bout of either yellow fever or malaria and had to be evacuated in a state of delirium. The “Cuban fever,” as he called it, certainly exacerbated his latent tuberculosis; nevertheless, while he was still recovering Crane mysteriously returned to Cuba—well after the other correspondents had left—and spent the better part of four months living a kind of underground existence in Havana. Though he filed an occasional report for Hearst’s Journal, he was for the most part incommunicado; even his closest companions and his common-law wife had no idea where he was or what he was doing. The Havana sojourn remains something of an enigma in Crane’s biography.

  As it turned out, though I had all but given up on the possibility of visiting Gitmo, while I was in Santiago I fortuitously learned of an opportunity to see the base—or at least to see into it. I was told that a Cuban travel agency, Gaviota, offered tours to a Cuban military facility, an observation post called Mirador de Malones, located on a hillside just outside the American-occupied site. From there, one could look through a telescope and spy on the naval base. It sounded too bizarre to be true—as so many things in Cuba do; but when I inquired at the Gaviota office in Santiago, the bizarre turned out to be true—as it so often does in Cuba. The agent told me that a German tour group was going to the military lookout the next day. I could join the group if I wished. Moreover, the Germans were going to pass the night in Caimanera, the small town closest to the naval base, a town normally off-limits to visitors. This, too, I could do if interested. I booked the tour.

  The following day I joined the Germans on a sleek tour bus that raced along a highway all but devoid of motorized traffic. There were plenty of bicycles, horses, and pedestrians, but few buses or trucks and even fewer private cars. After a couple of hours, we passed through Guantánamo City, once a favorite destination of American sailors on liberty call but now a sleepy provincial town “with little to recommend it,” as guidebooks like to say. Beyond Guantánamo City, the road passed through sugarcane fields until, after 25 kilometers or so, it arrived at the northern edge of Guantánamo Bay. The bus left the main highway and came to a c
heckpoint, the entrance to Cuba’s military zone. From there, the road led into the hills overlooking the wide southern portion of the bay where the US base was located. At the foot of one hill, we exited the bus, passed through a concrete bunker, and climbed steps to the lookout—which proved to be not much more than a ramada draped with camouflage netting.

  A thousand feet below and several miles distant, the bay and the naval base rippled in the tropical haze. It looked unreal, like some mythic realm. But once I got my turn at the military telescope, what I saw through the viewfinder was not mythic in the least. It was, in fact, all too familiar and mundane: cars on a boulevard, a shopping center, a church, a golf course, the American flag flapping. What made it strange, of course, was that this all-American scenery was on Cuban soil, situated behind concertina-wire fencing and bordered by a minefield.

  The guide, speaking in German, drew attention to various features of the base, first on a detailed map and then in reality, pointing to one hazy sector or another while the German tourists craned necks, snapped photos, and tried to clarify for one another what the guide was pointing to. Unable to follow the German conversation, I moved a little way off and tried to correlate the panorama before me with what I knew from reading Stephen Crane’s account of the Guantánamo episode that began the Spanish-American War.

  On June 6, 1898, Crane arrived at Guantánamo Bay just after the Marines had landed and secured the location. With night falling, Cuba appeared “sombre” to Crane. Come daylight, he would note that it was a craggy country cut with ravines. Sandy paths disappeared into thickets of tropical vegetation. Along the coastline, chalky cliffs and cactus-covered ridges overlooked the sea. “The droning of insects” competed with the sound of waves lapping the shore. Crane watched as the Marines—a force of over 600—set up camp and dug trenches. Encamped on the beach beneath ridges, they were in a vulnerable position. But the Marines had met no resistance upon landing, and for a day and a half all was tranquil: “There was no firing,” Crane reported. “We thought it rather comic.”

  The tranquility did not last. The next night, Spanish snipers opened fire and the Americans scrambled for cover. “We lay on our bellies,” Crane wrote. “It was no longer comic.” Crane, who had written his famous war novel, The Red Badge of Courage, without any personal knowledge of warfare, was finally experiencing what he had only guessed at beforehand. For the first time, he felt “the hot hiss of bullets trying to cut [his] hair.”

  But whatever satisfaction or thrill he felt in finally experiencing battle conditions was soon undercut: On the third night, the sniper fire intensified. The company’s surgeon, struck by a Spanish bullet, lay suffering a few yards from Crane. “I heard someone dying near me,” Crane wrote.

  He was dying hard. Hard. It took him a long time to die. He breathed as all noble machinery breathes when it is making its gallant strife against breaking, breaking. But he was going to break. He was going to break. It seemed to me, this breathing, the noise of a heroic pump which strives to subdue a mud which comes upon it in tons. The darkness was impenetrable. The man was lying in some depression within seven feet of me. Every wave, vibration, of his anguish beat upon my senses. He was long past groaning. There was only the bitter strife for air which pulsed out into the night in a clear penetrating whistle with intervals of terrible silence in which I held my own breath in the common unconscious aspiration to help. I thought this man would never die. I wanted him to die. Ultimately he died.

  Crane did not know the man’s identity until a voice in the darkness announced that the doctor had died. He then realized that the dead man was John Gibbs, whom Crane had befriended during the previous two days. War was suddenly very real to the previously inexperienced war correspondent: “I was no longer a cynic,” he wrote. These first nights under fire proved to be trying in the extreme: “With a thousand rifles rattling; with the field-guns booming in your ears; with the diabolical Colt automatics clacking; with the roar of the Marblehead coming from the bay, and, last, with Mauser bullets sneering always in the air a few inches over one’s head, and with this enduring from dusk to dawn, it is extremely doubtful if any one who was there will be able to forget it easily.”

  The next day, there were services for Gibbs even as the Spanish resumed their sniping. Crane retreated to the beach and sat on a rickety pier with a bottle of whisky that he had procured from a fellow journalist. He stared into “the shallow water where crabs were meandering among the weeds, and little fishes moved slowly in the shoals.”

  Though he confessed to feeling somewhat unnerved from “the weariness of the body, and the more terrible weariness of the mind” that came with being under fire, Crane accepted an invitation to tag along with a detachment of Marines on an expedition to flush Spanish guerrillas from the surrounding hills. Some 200 Marines left camp at dawn, guided by a contingent of 50 Cuban insurgents. American correspondents covering the war generally expressed a negative view of Cuban soldiers such as these. Crane’s impression of them was more ambivalent: “They were a hard-bitten, undersized lot,” he wrote in a dispatch for Pulitzer’s World, “most of them negroes, and with the stoop and curious gait of men who had at one time labored at the soil. They were, in short, peasants—hardy, tireless, uncomplaining peasants—and they viewed in utter calm these early morning preparations for battle.” In Crane’s view, they demonstrated a similar stolidity and nonchalance in response to their officers’ orders.

  Crane thought he detected greater determination in the American soldiers: “Contrary to the Cubans, the bronze faces of the Americans were not stolid at all. One could note the prevalence of a curious expression—something dreamy, the symbol of minds striving to tear aside the screen of the future and perhaps expose the ambush of death. It was not fear in the least. It was simply a moment in the lives of men who have staked themselves and come to wonder who wins—red or black?”

  The Cuban terrain impressed Crane as he followed the American soldiers. A narrow path wound around the bases of some high, bare spurs then ascended a chalky cliff and passed through dense thickets. Insects hummed all around. Reaching a clearing, Crane and the soldiers could look down the chaparral-covered ridges to the sea. Next came a steep climb through cactus patches and then a hike along a ridge to where the troops—exhausted and thirsty but also, according to Crane, “contented, almost happy”—encountered the Spanish guerrillas who were hidden in a thicket, waiting to open fire on the Americans and Cubans.

  “The fight banged away with a roar like a forest fire,” Crane observed. During the ensuing combat, this intense noise proved overwhelming. “The whole thing was an infernal din. One wanted to clap one’s hands to one’s ears and cry out in God’s name for the noise to cease; it was past bearing.” Amidst this din, Crane detected a variety of sounds, the nuanced noise of war: “And still crashed the Lees and the Mausers, punctuated by the roar of the [USS] Dolphin’s guns. Along our line the rifle locks were clicking incessantly, as if some giant loom was running wildly, and on the ground among the stones and weeds came dropping, dropping a rain of rolling brass shells.”

  Crane’s propensity for eliciting such precise details from a scene amazed—and exasperated—his fellow correspondents. They readily perceived his obvious disdain for the grind of daily journalism; Crane often said his real aim was not to produce dispatches but to collect material for a new novel. According to his colleague Ernest McCready, Crane was “contemptuous of mere news getting or news reporting.” In composing his dispatches, Crane was, according to another colleague, “an artist, deliberating over this phrase or that, finicky about a word, insisting upon frequent changes and erasures.” Reportedly, he went through many cigarettes as he wrote (despite being tubercular). McCready, a journalist with long experience, urged Crane “to forget scenery and the ‘effects’” and stick to the fundamentals: “This has to be news,” the veteran correspondent told him, “sent at cable rates. You can save your flubdub and shoot it to New York by mail. What I want is the straight st
ory of the fight.”

  But Crane could not easily settle for the straight story, even if months had to pass before his personal impressions yielded up the deeper story that he sought. In the case of Guantánamo, half a year went by before Crane turned those impressions into what his colleague and rival Richard Harding Davis called “one of the finest examples of descriptive writing of the war.” The story, published in McClure’s Magazine (February 1899) and later in Crane’s collection Wounds in the Rain, was “Marines Signalling Under Fire at Guantánamo.” The narrative concerns “four Guantánamo marines, officially known for the time as signalmen, [whose duty it was] to lie in the trenches of Camp McCall, that faced the water, and, by day, signal the Marblehead with a flag and, by night, signal the Marblehead with lanterns.” No other journalist mentions these signalmen; Crane, however, devoted an entire story to them, closely observing them and detailing their extraordinary courage—a trait that always fascinated Crane—as they were called upon “to coolly take and send messages.” Crane described how, without hesitation, a signalman would stand on a cracker box to send messages to the ships offshore, exposing himself to sniper fire. “Then the bullets began to snap, snap, snap at his head, while all the woods began to crackle like burning straw.” Watching the signalman’s face “illumed as it was by the yellow shine of lantern light,” Crane noted “the absence of excitement, fright, or any emotion at all in his countenance” as the signalman performed his duty. In contrast, watching from the relative safety of the trench, Crane felt “utterly torn to rags,” his nerves “standing on end like so many bristles.”